Pauper's Empire

by Levi Jacobs

  She screamed in response but the trio was already moving, circling to attempt once again surrounding him. Coordinated, then, unlike the one he’d faced in the forest.

  Pearly.

  Tai let them circle him, thinking through his options. He had no backup, no weapons, no militiamen who could overcome their voices at a key moment and kill these things.

  What he had was the river.

  They rushed in, belt knives drawn—they didn’t seem to be armed otherwise—and Tai dodged upward, turning to slam them down into the river with columns of air, as Semeca had done to him. He had no bridge to drop on them, but as soon as their bodies hit the muddy bottom he released his push, praying the river current would confuse them, take them, that they would try screaming and drown instead.

  No luck—all three burst from the river in unison, scorched skin streaming water, arrowing for him.

  Probably felt good, actually. Meck.

  Tai dodged, trying to get in position, trying to decide which of them was the leader. That there was a leader at all was just a theory, but it was better than nothing.

  Tai plunged the singe-haired woman into the water, narrowly dodging the other pair’s attempt to grab him. If she was the leader, it would stand to reason the others would lose coordination for a moment while she lost sight and fought drowning.

  A moment long enough to kill them, hopefully.

  The waters swallowed her but the other two came on unperturbed, regrouping to come at him like two sides of a vice. Tai scissored air at the nearer one, a lanky man unburned save for one side of his face. He screamed out in pain but kept on, and a moment later the woman burst up from just beneath him. Tai shot away, escaping only through the speed of his resonance.

  A rapidly dwindling resonance—he could feel the ache creeping up his spine. It had been there since the bridge.

  Focus. There was still time. The woman wasn’t the leader—the half-burned man, then. Tai spun and dodged and shoved the man down into water. The other two came at him, flying in unison, and Tai growled in frustration, shooting himself straight up. The half-burned man emerged from the waters unscathed.

  Fat one, then. It had to be.

  Something hard slammed down on his ribcage, squeezing. Air. They were scissoring air like he did, to try and crush him.

  He fought back, pushing his own air against theirs, spine burning in earnest now. He needed to make this fast, or he was dead. Distract the leader. Kill the others.

  Tai slammed the fat one into the river with a fistful of air and turned to fight the others. This had to work.

  The other two came on undisturbed. The fat man burst from the water.

  There was no leader. Or if there was, it wasn’t here.

  Panic threatened him then, as he raced along the river toward the fort, spine burning, doing all he could just to stay ahead. How was he going to survive this? Try to outdistance them? Run them out of uai? But he was the one running low on uai.

  Fine, then. If he couldn’t do it with resonance or clever theories, he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way.

  Tai took a big gulp of air and shot himself into the river. Three plunges sounded moments later, the Broken diving in behind him, and Tai grinned. A hand brushed him. He grabbed it and pulled.

  Down here the silty water made them all blind, so they couldn’t coordinate attacks. And without air to seize, their resonances didn’t work. That meant it was down to grappling hand-to-hand. He still couldn’t defeat all three of them in a fair fight, but this was far from that.

  And fighting in the streets was never fair.

  Tai plunged his thumbs into the Broken’s eye sockets, felt the body go stiff and heard the scream. He let go—they would be swallowing air the next moment.

  Another body ran into him—the fat one, from the feel of it. They twisted and grappled in the current, Broken scoring a few jabs with his knife, Tai seeking for the eyes, the throat, the groin, the places he’d learned to target growing up hungry and homeless in Ayugen.

  He had just gotten a hold on the man’s throat, chest heaving but needing this Broken dead more than he needed air, when they were both slammed into the mud, water rushing away around them.

  The third Broken floated at the top of a wide open bowl of air. She’d found them. Would kill him, now, if he didn’t do something fast.

  Tai did the first thing that came to mind. He shoved against the thick man’s neck, his spine, strengthening his push with a hammer of air behind it.

  A horrible pop sounded, and the body began jerking. One more to go.

  The Broken above shot down at him, feet first. He shoved outward, trying to escape, but she hit with a loud crack.

  Pain exploded up his body, and the waters rushed in.

  31

  “Come on, come on,” Ella gritted, standing at the head of the rowboat. They’d been watching Tai’s fight as the boat made its maddeningly slow way down the river, Feynrick and Dayglen working the oars. Her uai was back, dying to be used, though she didn’t know what a timeslip could do in an aerial fight.

  First they had to get there.

  “Can’t you row any faster?”

  Feynrick glared at her, brawler’s resonance buzzing from him. “Maybe you’d like to strike your resonance and join us.”

  She would if it mattered—slowing time didn’t change the resistance of water, or air for that matter. She could row water in slip, it would just be four times harder than at regular speed. That combined with her relative lack of strength made it a moot point.

  “He’s coming!” she cried, seeing him shoot across the water towards them, trio of Broken at his back. “Row!”

  Tai had been trying to drown the Broken, or possibly to distract their leader, with no success. Ella wasn’t sure what else to do, but if he lead them close enough, she would damn well do something.

  Instead he plunged himself into the water. “Shatting idiot,” she cursed, slamming her fist on her thigh. “That way, Feynrick! Over there!”

  “I see him, lass,” the brawler growled, oars already moving at twice their normal speed.

  All three Broken followed Tai into the water, and then—nothing. The Ein rolled northward, waters covering their passing like it’d never been. Did they all drown? Die together? She refused to believe it.

  Then one of the Broken shot from the water—a woman, from the looks of it—and thrust her hands downward, opening up a pit of air in the middle of the current.

  “Faster!” she yelled. “He has to be there!”

  They were fifty paces away, forty, then the Broken shoved herself downward, legs locked in a kick Ella didn’t doubt was meant to break Tai’s spine, or wound him enough that he would drown. “Faster!”

  Too late—the waters closed above the Broken, and Ella cursed. So did Feynrick and Dayglen, speeding them the last twenty paces to where the pit had been.

  The boat slowed, stopped, rocking in the current, waters as peaceful as if nothing had happened, as if Ella was on a day jaunt off the aft deck of the Swallowtail Mistress, three months and a thousand years ago.

  “Come on come on come on,” she gritted, spinning in a circle, watching the water. Wafters couldn’t use their resonance underwater, at least she didn’t think they could, so they should be surfacing close by. If she could just—

  “There!” Feynrick shouted, and she struck resonance.

  The wind slowed. The waves paused. And there breaking from the water with one fist forward and the other wrapped around Tai’s neck was a Broken—the woman, skin horribly burned from the pavilion fire.

  “Should have killed you when I had the chance,” Ella gritted, pulling Feynrick’s axe from his time-stilled hands. It was terribly heavy, but that didn’t matter.

  Ella leapt from the boat, praying Kellandrials hadn’t been stretching the truth to fill out a broadsheet. She’d read that timeslips could sometimes run ten or twenty paces out over water, the increased resistance of water working in their favor for a short
time. If it wasn’t true Tai was dead—if he wasn’t already, his face looked deathly pale—and she’d be left floundering in the water in the bulky dress she’d worn to play the part of Mrs. Fensley.

  It worked though—her feet hit water thick as mud, as she ran as light as she could toward the water surging up around the Broken and Tai, whose face grimaced in pain, but that was good, that meant he was still feeling, he was alive.

  Each step sunk her further in, from shoes to ankles to calves, time and gravity catching up with her, but she reached the Broken before she was even knee-deep, and snarling swung the axe in a vicious arc.

  It chopped into the side of the Broken’s neck and stuck there, her swing not strong enough to break the spine, but it was enough. Shock registered slowly on the Broken’s burned face, blood beginning to jet straight outwards from the wound, and Ella reached for Tai, sinking past her knees now.

  “Come here,” she whispered, pulling at him, the Broken’s grip releasing but the water’s hold too much, Ella pulling herself in as much as she was pulling him out. It didn’t matter. The Broken’s eyes were already going blank. She was dead, and Feynrick could pick up the pieces. Ella pried the Broken’s arm off and got her hands around Tai, sunk in past her waist now. That was okay. They were safe.

  Ella muted her resonance and pulled Tai close, river Ein swallowing them up.

  32

  Kingdoms rise and fall like grass in a forest glade. Always there, different and still the same, men shouting and dying for reasons soon forgot. We must be the trees, observing it all, benefiting from it all, waiting for our shadows to blot them out.

  --Author Unknown, Book of the Ninespears

  Feynrick crouched over the piss-poor fire. Tai lay unconscious on his right, kenneler’s splint along his upper thigh. They’d wrapped it in Feynrick’s coat to keep the swelling down, and as the cold set in he was wishing they’d used anything else. Maybe one of Ella’s underskirts, drying over the bushes surrounding their camp.

  Dayglen sat to his right, turning two hairy tubers on long sticks over the fire. Piss-poor food it was, for four adults, but they couldn’t risk hunting this close to Gendrys, couldn’t risk getting caught with Tai still unconscious. They’d let the boat drift a few thousandpace downstream, then pulled it up into a dense thicket, but they still had to be careful. Thus the piss-poor fire. And the chill.

  “How long do these things take to cook?” the Achuri man asked, gazing at the tubers with distrust. Apparently street thugs didn’t eat hairy tubers.

  “Hour, maybe two,” he said. “But we’d better hope the lady comes back with salt, or some chilis. They can be rough if ye gotta eat em without.”

  “Ancestors send she comes back at all,” Dayglen said. They’d talked with Lady Ella the better part of an hour about what to do. Dayglen had wanted to push for Ayugen, though it’d be hell on Tai in a litter. Feynrick had been in favor of holing up for a day or two, surviving off the land while things cooled down. And Ella had insisted she needed to sneak back into Gendrys, use her timeslipping to steal them some medicine and real food and check on the aftermath of the afternoon.

  As usual, the woman had gotten her way. It was probably for the best—it’d been a while since he’d had a hairy tuber supper, and he’d be fine if it was a while longer yet. Plus, that redness in Tai’s face couldn’t be good—the bone hadn’t broken the skin, but he’d taken a few other stabs that could green if they weren’t watched.

  An owl hooted in the distance. An owl that sounded like it’d probably never met a real owl, just fancy lighthaired nursemaids imitating owls. Feynrick made the same imaginary-owl sound back, and after a few minutes the lady pushed through the thick underbrush.

  “Oh thank mercy,” she breathed, shivering, and crouched herself over the fire, right in the line of smoke.

  Feynrick grinned but let her adjust herself before he spoke. Time would pass quicker with a lady around. “Got out of it alive, eh?”

  “Worst part was swimming the river back,” she chattered. “You sure winter’s going to g-get colder than this?”

  “Oh aye. This is still more or less summer, lass. It’s going to get piss-barking cold fore it’s done.”

  She shuddered, then looked at the hairy tubers. “What’s that?”

  “Supper, less ye brought us something better.”

  “Well they’re wet now, but yes, I stole a few millet cakes and meat pies from the bakers on my way through town.”

  Dayglen dropped the tubers in the fire. “Praise the ghosts,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  Lady Ella pulled the foods from her pack and Feynrick tried his best not to notice the way her wet clothes clung to her youthful frame. What Gleesfen said about it he outright ignored: you didn’t try wooing your commander’s lady. Even if he was a milkweed.

  “How’s Tai doing?” Ella asked, after they’d all gotten a few bites down, and Dayglen had thrown a branch of dry leaves on for a burst of warmth. Feynrick also ignored Gleesfen’s suggestions for how he and Ella might keep warm.

  “Been better, I’d reckon,” Feynrick said, fishing the tubers out of the fire. He’d worked hard to find those. “D’you find any hardenswort in town?”

  “I did,” she said, pulling a waxed packet from her bodice. “And a tin cup to boil water in.”

  “Genitors be praised,” Feynrick said, as much about the potential for bush tea as making Tai a tincture. “Let’s get it started.”

  Dayglen went down to the river to scoop water and Feynrick did his piss-barking best to watch the fire as Lady Ella stripped behind him, complaining loudly of how cold her underskirts were. “They’re dry at least, ain’t they?” he asked as she stepped back into the firelight.

  “Marginally,” she said, arranging herself as only a Worldsmouth woman could on the hard ground. Lady Ella was a rebel sure enough, and a hard woman to judge from the way she killed Broken, but there was no denying she was a Worldsmouth lady too. Just look at how much she had to fidget on that mud—wasn’t doing anything but getting her fine dress dirtier. A Yatiwoman, now, they learned to appreciate a patch of mud betimes.

  Dayglen came back and set the cup in the fire to boil. “How’d the rest of the town look?” the Achuri man asked. The former thug was the handsomer of the two men, Feynrick had to admit, though Feynrick had experience. Women appreciated experience.

  Not that it mattered. But competing for a lady’s attention was a grand old way to pass the time.

  “Bad,” Lady Ella said. “Or good, from our perspective. I didn’t go into the army camp but it looked half-destroyed, and some of the Broken brawlers got into the town too. Houses were smashed, roofs caved in—it’s amazing what the Broken can do, even without guidance.”

  Feynrick grinned. “Did our work for us, far as I can see. Lot of packing up in the army camp then?”

  She nodded. “Speaking of which, what happened between you and Riker?”

  So the lass remembered the gusto with which he’d clocked the old boarscock. “Oh just an old bone. Riker tended to think redhairs wasn’t worth pissing on, and I tended to disagree despite my station, and betimes those disagreements didn’t end pretty. Story I told him about how I got to Ayugen wasn’t all wrong, though I ended up working for Coldferth rather than your ladyship.”

  The lady snorted. “I’m no lady. Had about enough ladying this afternoon to last a decade.”

  Feynrick raised his eyebrows. “Played it pretty well as far as I could tell.”

  “Yeah well. When you have a mother like mine…”

  She didn’t finish the thought, and he didn’t press it. People’s mothers were their own business. And if that had been an impersonation of her mother, he’d be fine if she kept it her business.

  “Don’t suppose you could tell if the people in town were angry toward us or not,” Dayglen asked, rubbing that damned rugged chin of his. Trying to get Ella to notice it, belike. Women appreciated rugged chins.

  “I didn’t stop to check,” Ella
said, holding her palms over the fitful blaze, “but they seemed scared. They were still clearing Broken bodies from the streets and—there were other bodies too. With any luck they’ll be angry at the Councilate for doing it so close to town, for putting them at risk.”

  That was a sweet thought. For all her smarts Lady Ella obviously hadn’t spent much time in the colonies. “Won’t matter,” Feynrick said. “Worldsmouth’ll crack down after this. It’s all fake grins and talk of reeducation till they get threatened. Then the teeth come out.”

  “You don’t think they’ll just pack up and leave?”

  He thought a moment about the best way to not make her look stupid. Ladies like Ella, they didn’t like being made to look stupid. “Which way were they taking the tents, toward the docks or toward open ground?”

  Her face fell. “Open ground.”

  “Well there ye are then.” Didn’t matter and she was Tai’s lady anyway, but let ol Dayglen try and top that kind of wise chatter. Gleesfen belched in support.

  “Well their Broken are dead at least,” the lady said. “Or most of them.”

  “Aye, they are at that. That was good work back there, thinking to torch the place.”

  “I should have killed them when I had the chance,” the lady growled. “To think the three that did this were asleep in the same room where I was timeslipping. I could have slit their throats.”

  “Ah, ye did enough,” Feynrick said, feeling real sympathy for her. He’d had the same type of thought many times. “That’d be a cold thing, to cut that many sleeping throats.”

  Dayglen nodded. “Fighter’s remorse. We all get it. You did the best you could at the time. You just have to leave it at that.”

  Piss on the man. That sounded an awful lot like wise chatter too. And of course he went back to rubbing that rugged chin afterwards. “Dayglen. Ain’t that water hot enough yet?”

  The Achuriman pulled it from the fire and stirred in hardenswort caps to steep. “It buys us time at least,” Dayglen said. “Did you two learn anything before the fight?”